Don’t Touch Me I’m Prickly - Part I
I first read Phoebe Kranefuss’s writing in a workshop a few years ago and was taken by how her humor was so fresh and incredibly effective at revealing her narrators’ inner worlds. I’m thrilled that we get to publish her story, “Don’t Touch Me I’m Prickly,” for the first issue of The Rejoinder.
In this story, we meet Celine, admitted to a residential facility for treatment for an eating disorder. At turns hilarious and harrowing, this story poses really great questions about vulnerability and the stories we spin about ourselves.
-Michael
Dr. Shibori had thick, unkempt eyebrows and a stomach that strained against the buttons of his oxford, exposing slivers of undershirt. Celine wondered if there was a Mrs. Shibori who ironed his shirts and had dinner on the table when he came home from a long day of improving the wellbeing of people like her.
“So, Celine,” he said, tapping the bottom of a stuffed manila folder against his desk with a double thwack. “Can you tell me why you sit like that?” He gestured at her legs, which she’d threaded together beneath her. She knew that when she stood up, the bottom leg—her left—would be numb.
She uncoiled her legs now that they were under suspicion. “Is there something wrong with the way I sit?” she asked. She repositioned her thighs into neat parallels, her slippered feet flat to the ground.
“Oh, no,” Dr. Shibori said. “In fact, it’s common. Very common, actually, for EDO patients to sit like that.”
“Okay,” she said. She didn’t like how intently he looked at her.
He stood from his desk with a sudden jolt. “E-D-O,” he said, writing the letters on the board in quick strokes. She pictured him getting home to Mrs. Shibori, stroking her hair and thanking her for the strong coffee she’d made that morning. It had been a good day. Full of teachable moments. “Do you know what that stands for?” He held the marker’s wet tip just a hair from the board. The room was small enough that Celine could rise and push him in one swift motion, not enough to hurt him—she didn’t want that—but enough that he’d brace himself against the whiteboard in order not to fall, marker first.
“Eating Disorder.” He wrote the word on the board, capitalizing the O. “How does that word make you feel?”
“It’s two words,” she said.
“You’re good at evading,” he said. “Not uncommon. It’s one of my favorite things about this population: you tend to be sharp. Quick.”
It had been a long morning answering questions from the chapped mouths of sterile and interchangeable professionals. She was tired of them peering at her from beneath furrowed, sympathetic brows while she filled in bubbles: How often do you feel completely alone in the world? Have you ever been hospitalized? Attempted suicide? Who makes up your support system?
“I know how this goes. We can skip it, if you want,” she said.
Dr. Shibori sat down in his chair and leaned back. “How does this go, Celine, in your experience?” He lifted his legs from the linoleum floor, as if to stack them casually atop his desk, then lowered them back to the floor. Thought better of it, maybe. The desk was a long way from the floor. “What does this,” he gestured around the small room: its sunken tweed couch, a lamp whose plug lay prone on the carpet a few inches from an outlet, a blank wall with four tack holes in the shape of a forgotten poster, “mean to Celine?”
“Look, Dr. Shibori. I appreciate what you’re doing here. I appreciate—I get that you’re here for me, and that you want to help. And I know what happens next. You’ll ask me some questions, and then get someone to weigh me, then someone else will come grab me, talk around me or whatever, tell me it’s time for lunch. And pretend that lunch looks good, which—I realize I’m not necessarily a reliable source when it comes to this sort of thing—” she threw her hands up in the air, palms to mottled ceiling, “but, I mean, would you eat the shit they serve?”
He nodded. Wrote something down on his pad of paper without breaking eye contact.
“I see,” he said, capping his pen. For a brief moment, Celine felt bad for him. A part of her wanted to comply so that Dr. Shibori could tell Mrs. Shibori over chicken piccata or meatloaf that he was making great headway with a particularly difficult case. That she’d been to three treatment centers already, and no one had been able to get through to her, but he, Dr. Shibori—although Celine supposed he was probably on a first name basis with his wife—was getting somewhere. That’s wonderful, honey, she pictured Mrs. Shibori saying as she sawed into dinner with cutlery that had been given to them at their wedding some thirty years prior.
“And why is that, Celine? What is it about recovery,” he paused to punctuate the word with air quotes, “that scares you?”
“I never said it scares me,” she said. “It’s just not for me. If the choice is between being thin—which, I’m not even that thin—and miserable, or recovered, as you call it, which is to say: fat and still miserable, then the choice seems clear. I’m not trying to be difficult. I just don’t have a lot to—well,” she looked up at the ceiling and assessed its pockmarked tiles. “I don’t know. Live for, I guess. Not to, like, show my hand. But—yeah.”
Dr. Shibori nodded, his brows knitted together in somber concentration. “I see.”
“Good,” she said.
“That’s common, you know.”
“I know.”
“Symptomatic, even.”
“I know.”
“It’s part of the reason the refeeding process is so important. With it, your mood will begin to stabilize, and you might even find that hope creeps back in.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“What questions do you have for me?”
“None,” she said. “I know the drill. But I appreciate your—care, I guess.” And she meant it. Dr. Shibori seemed kind, the type of man who’d gotten into this for the right reasons: an anorexic daughter, maybe, back when starvation had been shocking and complicated and before it had become a right of passage. De rigueur, like getting an iPhone or spending a semester abroad.
“Well,” he said, smoothing his hands in his lap. “I’ll see you again tomorrow, Celine. Keep an open mind, if you can. I, for one, am rooting for you.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
*****
Celine pushed a forkful of macaroni and cheese beneath a soggy leaf of lettuce.
“They’re gonna make you drink an Ensure you know,” said the girl to her right. She was the thinnest at the table, which meant she had clout. The second thinnest girl had brown hair, and was almost pretty, except her nose was too big for her face.
“Whatever,” said Celine.
There was a man with sad sunken eyes and a woman who didn’t look old enough to be here, clad in a t-shirt with a cartoon cat on it where her boobs should have been. Below it, in bubble letters: ONE COOL CAT. She seemed on the verge of tears as she picked at a bunch of grapes, still on their vine. In the corner sat a single staff member, eyes cast downward toward a video on her phone. She played it loudly and without headphones.
“Suit yourself,” said the skinniest of the women. “I’m Genna, by the way. With a G.”
“I’m Celine. With a C.”
“Say hi to Celine, everyone,” said Genna. They went around the table: Emily, Salomon but Solly was fine, Jules.
“What are you all in for?” asked Celine.
“We don’t really ask that,” said Jules.
“Right,” said Celine. The bingers never wanted to say what they were in for. She mimed sticking a finger down her throat, and Jules pushed her tray away and started panting.
The staff member looked up, turned to them. “Jules,” she said. “Deep breaths, friend, but you know you have to finish.” Jules dissolved into tears, her shoulder shaking up and down as a bubble of snot percolated near the entrance of her left nostril.
Celine looked to Genna to exchange an eye roll—Celine had learned after her second residential stay that everything was more bearable when you could align yourself with the other skeptics. The worst thing was to be surrounded by people who took the process seriously: it was always the bingers and the pukers, who’d burst into theatrical tears as if they hadn’t been stuffing their faces with whoopie pies and chicken salad and currant scones and whole chocolate cakes for their entire lives. But Genna didn’t return the look. Instead, she shook her head at Celine, put a hand on Jules’s arm, and then, as if to rub it in, stabbed three grapes with her fork and ate them in one bite.
*****
On the second day, they filed into the Group Room for morning weigh-in. Of all the weigh-ins at all the treatment centers Celine had been to—Shady Oaks Recovery, Denver Acute Residential and Inpatient, Shady Oaks Recovery for the second time, and now Monterey Bay Center for Hope—Monterey Bay’s was by far the most mortifying.
According to her nametag, today's tired-looking staff member was a second-year PhD student named Annie. She handed Celine a gown. “Nothing underneath, unless you’re on your period. Then you can wear underwear. Are you on your period?” she asked Celine.
“I haven’t gotten my period in four years,” Celine said.
“No underwear then.”
“Are these gowns even sanitary?” Celine asked.
“They’re washed regularly,” Annie said. Genna, Solly and Jules were already gown-clad, sitting on the worn sofas that lined the group room where the scale was kept. Genna was playing solitaire on an old iPod Touch. Emily was shading the entire page of an adult coloring book with red colored pencil, ignoring the outlines. Solly was stretched out, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed over his chest like a mummy. Jules stood up and went to the scale. Celine tried not to look at the doughy crack of Jules’s ass, almost entirely visible between the gown’s bowtied closures. Jules stepped backwards onto the scale, and the woman jotted a number onto her clipboard. She called out to Solly, who was next. He sighed loudly. Celine stood in the corner, bare feet to linoleum.
“You can come sit if you want,” Genna said, looking up from her iPod and patting the cushion next to her.
Celine considered telling Genna that she was more comfortable where she was, standing in the corner, arms crossed. But that would have been too obvious of a lie.
“Okay,” Celine said. She walked over and sat. She wondered what it would be like to have friends who beckoned to her in regular places, where people who were living real lives spent time with those they had chosen of their own volition. Just sitting at coffee shops or dinner tables or benches at the mall, judging strangers and laughing conspicuously. Genna’s pores were big up close. “Do we do this every day?”
“Well, yeah,” Genna said, looking up from her game of solitaire. “That’s why it’s called daily weigh-in.” She pushed herself up from her spot on the couch and made her way toward the scale.
*****
On the third day, they finished breakfast and weigh-in and crowded back into the Group Room so that Dr. Shibori could hand out a stack of composition books. Celine’s was dog-eared, its cover stickered and doodled on. Dr. Shibori told her that they liked to recycle here. That almost no one finished up an entire journal, so they tore the pages out and passed off used marbled notebooks to the next patient.
“Are there also traveling pants that come with the journal? That fit everyone?” Celine scoffed.
“Celine, save the quips for your journal,” Dr. Shibori said.
“I have carpal tunnel,” she said.
“That’s not in your file,” he said.
“I just got it today.”
“That’s not how that works,” Jules said.
“Can I just type? There’s a computer right there. Disability rights.”
“Fine, Celine,” he said with a sigh. He turned towards the rest of them. “Today we’re writing letters, which can be a cathartic part of the recovery process. Please choose a real person to write to. A friend, a teacher, a sibling, a dad, a mom—up to you.”
“What if our mom is dead?” Celine said.
“Good idea,” Jules said earnestly. “I’ll write to my dead mom. Since I miss her.”
“Gross,” Celine said. Jules looked hurt.
“What about an aunt or uncle? A mentor?” Dr. Shibori said.
“I’ll write to my sponsor,” Solly said. “She’s kind of hot.”
“Tell the page, not me,” Dr. Shibori said.
Celine started typing.
Dear Professor Sonnenberg,
My writing is going really well. I’ve been a machine, actually. I decided to take some time off from work, which has been good for me creatively. I have a series of linked short stories that I think are really—well, not good, exactly, but promising. I haven’t attached them because I want to take another read through. But I’ll send them soon. How are you?
Celine
*****
On the fourth day, Celine ate a bowl of cream of wheat, a whole banana, two tablespoons of peanut butter, an Odwalla smoothie, an apple, and fourteen almonds, all before lunch. She wanted to jump off a building by the time eleven AM group rolled around.
“Celine, I’d love to hear from you next,” Dr. Shibori said. “You’ve been here for four days now. On your first day, you mentioned you were pretty against this whole recovery thing—your words. Any change?” His stomach bulged over a faux-leather belt. Emily pulled a blanket tighter across her chest. Genna fidgeted with her bracelets, then pulled the sleeves of her flannel shirt over her hands. Solly tapped his foot against the ground, his face fixed into a permanent grimace. Jules sat on a beanbag, knitting a scarf with dull plastic needles, a bag of yarn at her feet, a single strand tethering her to the linoleum floor.
“Not really,” Celine said. “I just don’t really see the point in getting better. I only like life when—” she gestured at herself. “Well. I don’t really like life.” Her stomach was bloated and her body felt like it was growing out of its skin.
Dr. Shibori nodded. “Tell us more about that, Celine. What makes life bearable in this body?”
“I said life isn’t bearable.” She wanted to give Mrs. Shibori a call: Can you believe this dingbat? He hardly even listens! Does he do this to you? Can you tell him to pay attention? Have you considered a divorce?
“Okay,” Dr. Shibori nodded. “Comparatively, then. It seems like you find life more bearable when you’re restricting.”
“God,” Celine said. “I hate that word. It’s not restricting if I don’t even want the food in the first place. But anyway, I hate the heavy weight of food in my stomach. I hate it when my legs touch, which always happens when I get over a hundred pounds.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s fucking nasty.”
“No numbers,” Genna said.
“Sorry,” Celine said, rolling her eyes.
“Let’s talk about your support system,” Dr. Shibori said. “Friends? family? A partner?”
“Um—that doesn’t seem—my dad is an asshole and my mom is dead. Sort of, yeah, a boyfriend? He’s older.”
“Sorry for your loss,” Dr. Shibori said, nodding. “What’s that feel like?”
“Well, he’s—he broke up with me, actually.”
Dr. Shibori nodded. “I was asking about your mom, but please, go on.” Celine wasn’t going to tell this roomful of near strangers under fluorescent lights that Ryan had never asked her to be his girlfriend, that they’d had sex a few times over the course of two months, and he’d told her she was a “good kid,” but that he was still “enjoying being single,” which had seemed to Celine a weird thing to say to the woman you were fucking. But she also wasn’t going to tell them that she didn’t cry at her mom’s funeral, not because she wasn’t sad, but because she’d run out of tears after half a lifetime of pretending she didn’t care that her dad had left them and that her mom practically refused to acknowledge how she couldn’t control any of it.
“He was ready to have kids?” she said. “And I’m twenty-three, like, I don’t want to—not that I could, because—” she took a breath. Decided to tell at least a partial truth. “He said I was smart, and it felt special to be, I don’t know, wanted? By someone who had his own apartment. That he didn’t share with anyone. And a job and stuff.” There. Intimacy issues, she pictured him saying to his wife. Shame, too, because she’s a really pretty girl. One of the prettiest in the program, even.
“Being wanted can make us feel special, absolutely. Did you experience meaningful intimacy with this—what did you say his name was?”
“Ryan. Oh, yes. He’d go down on me for hours,” she said, slipping back into a lie. Solly perked up at that. Dr. Shibori blinked quickly and repeatedly, as if to clear from his head an image of Celine, spread eagle and moaning.
She’d never enjoyed sex with Ryan, partially because she was too anxious to orgasm even by herself, and partially because he’d been pushy and ungentle from the beginning. They’d spent their first date, if you could call it that, walking through Boston Commons, pointing out racist monuments to each other and talking through elaborate plans to knock them down in the middle of the night: rent a forklift, tie the statue to two hundred horses and get them to run, put an ad out on Craigslist for truck drivers willing to fashion some sort of battering ram to their vehicles, douse them in metal-dissolving acid. Then he’d taken her back to his place, and she’d felt safe because he had a whole wallful of books, which he’d explained were alphabetized by author, and people who alphabetized their books and cared about the removal of racist statues were, in Celine’s experience, safe. Boring, even. He’d asked if she wanted something to drink: scotch, beer, or chocolate milk, which he’d added as an afterthought, punctuating the offer with a laugh. “Oh, I love chocolate milk,” she’d said, as if flavored dairy was an inside joke between them, and not one hundred and eighty calories she’d now have to consume in his presence. He handed her a carton emblazoned with a dancing cow and the words I’M RECYCLABLE! She punched open the cellophane that separated the attached straw from the rest of the world.
“I like how you unwrap the straw,” he’d told her.
“Is there any other way?” she’d asked. It was supposed to be matter of fact but came out unintentionally flirty, and then he was pushing her onto her stomach, and she was face down on his tweed couch, which smelled like unseasoned chicken breast and Axe body spray, and he was pushing her dress up around her waist and sliding her underwear to the side.
I guess I don’t have to drink the chocolate milk after all, she’d thought. But suddenly he was pressing his way inside her, and it hurt, because she was dry as a paper towel and also prone to upper back pain.
“You’re so wet,” he’d said, as if saying it could make it true.
“Stop,” she’d said.
“I can’t. You feel too good,” he’d said, even though this couldn’t possibly be accurate; he was hardly all the way inside of her. She considered trying to roll away, but didn’t want to be dramatic.
“Can you at least wear a condom?” she’d said instead.
“I can’t feel anything with a condom. And plus, I’m too big for a condom,” he’d said, low and gravelly, as if for her benefit. He’d thrust into her again, and she thought that maybe he was right. It hurt. He flipped her onto her back.
“You have to,” she’d said. “Please.” And he’d groaned, extracted a square of foil from his wallet and rolled it onto himself. “Happy now?” he asked, sticking his pointer finger in her mouth. He’d pushed into her, then pulled out, fumbling between his legs for a moment, then pushed into her again, groaning. “Did you just—is it off?” she asked. But it was too late: he’d gone wild eyed and enthusiastic, and somewhere between putting the condom on and announcing that he was coming, he’d removed it again. She tried to push him off of her, but he was way too strong, so she gripped onto his pockmarked back instead—craters where pimples had once been—and she let it happen: him splooging into her, both of them moaning, Ryan genuinely, and Celine convincingly, as if they both wanted this equally.
“That was so hot,” he said, and she thought about suggesting they go out for Korean Hot Pot, because that sounded like the kind of thing that normal people who were having normal sex would do, but instead she said nothing.
“You’re welcome to sleep over,” he said. She didn’t want to, but she also didn’t want to take the T back home alone this late. The next morning, she kissed him goodbye, then spent two weeks of babysitting money on a single Plan B. They fucked again, eight or nine times over the course of a few months, and then he told her he wanted to “focus on work” as if he’d devoted any significant amount of time to her at all.
“And how did that feel when he broke up with you?” Dr. Shibori asked.
“Shitty, obviously, but it’s fine. I mean, he has a new girlfriend. I saw on Instagram.”
“What does anyone else have to say about this?” Dr. Shibori asked.
Jules looked up from her knitting. “He sounds like a dick, and I don’t think you’re letting yourself grieve,” she said. “And it will get stuck—the grief—if you don’t move through it.”
“Bingo, Jules,” Dr. Shibori said. “You’re sharing what you’ve learned as you’ve grieved your mom’s passing. Tell us more about that.”
And Jules did: how her mom had died of ovarian cancer when Jules was in middle school, and how Jules had started stuffing herself with her mom’s favorite food, which had been babka, until she’d thrown up, and then it had become a sort of crutch, and Celine had remembered the time that Ryan brought her a babka, and she’d pretended to eat it then buried it in his trashcan when he’d gone into the other room.
“What about your mom?” Jules asked when she was done.
“Car crash,” Celine lied. The others nodded, but they didn’t push her.
To be continued…
Phoebe Kranefuss is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She studied English Literature at Bowdoin College, she's taught fourth grade, worked at an eating disorder clinic, survived entry level sales at a tech company, and spent some years in tech and advertising. When she's not writing, she's biking, running, reading, or crafting. Her work has been published in the Breakwater Review and Slackjaw, and she's at work on her first novel, Girls Our Age.
Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and check out more of her work here.